Posts Tagged ‘doctors’

Turning Around the Economics of Going to the Doc

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

One of the more interesting parts of the conversation we had with David Lee was around thinking about changing the economics of going to the doctor. As David explained, a regular doctor visit has a bad risk/reward situation: There is a low liklihood anything is wrong but good chance that if something is wrong that it’s serious. On top of this, people have a tendency to overestimate small risks and devalue the future, all leading to a situation where it’s hard to get people into a regular routine of visits.

So how can this be fixed? Well, it’s counterintuitive, but first off you’d need to accurately communicate to people the low risk of the situation by letting them know just how unlikely it is that anything is wrong with them. Then, in the case that something actually was, you’d have to be prepared with a good explanation of how to approach the issue and the liklihood of success (again, people will tend to think that the risk is higher than it really is).

Posted by Noah in GE Healthcare Wisconsin
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Primary Care vs Specialists

Friday, June 19th, 2009

Another entry inspired by How Doctors Think for your (in case you missed the last it was about confirmation bias). This time it’s about the differences between primary care physicians and specialists and the way they’re viewed by society.

I just loved this long quote from Dr. Eric Cassell’s book Doctoring: The Nature of Primary Care Medicine:

One should not confuse highly technical, even complicated, medical knowledge — special practical knowledge about an unusual disease, treatment (complex chemotherapy, for example), condition or technology — with the complex, many-sized worldy-wise knowledge we expect of the best physicians.

The narrowest subspecialist, the reasoning goes, should also be able to provide this range of medical services. This naive idea arises, as do so many other wrong beliefs about primary care, because of the concept that doctors take care of diseases. Diseases, the idea goes on, form a hierarchy from simple to difficult. Specialists take care of difficult diseases, so, of course, they will naturally do a good job on simple diseases. Wrong. Doctors take care of people, some of whom have diseases and all of whom have some problem. People used to doing complicated things usually do complicated things in simple situations–for example, ordering tests or x-rays when waiting a few days might suffice–thus overtreating people with simple illnesses and overlooking the clues about other problems that might have brought the patient to the doctor.

Never really thought of it that way but it makes a whole lot of sense.

Posted by Noah in The World
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Helping Doctors Think

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

Over the weekend I finally finished the book How Doctors Think (which will be on our inaugural GE reading list since it was recommended by someone in healthcare). The book is excellent and I’d highly recommend it if you’re into this sort of stuff, it’s basically a study of the cognitive biases of doctors.

Anyhow, I’ve got about half of it underlined and will probably write a few posts from those over the next few weeks, the first of which is this one.

One of the themes of the book is that a patient should help their doctor snap out of confirmation bias (“confirming what you expect to find by selectively accepting or ignoring information”). The book suggests two simple questions to ask your doctor if you suspect this is what’s going on:

  1. What’s the worst thing this could be? “By asking that question, a patient, friend, or family member can slow down the doctor’s pace and help him think more broadly.”
  2. What body parts are near where I am having my symptom? This helps expand a conversation that might be stalled by pain in or around a chronic condition for example. By thinking about the nearby organs a doctor might be pushed to ask some new questions.

In telling Benjamin about this we got to thinking about how we could turn these questions/answers into little applications, maybe even for the phone, so you can take them with you and be armed with questions to ask your doctor.

Posted by Noah in The World
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How Do We Encourage More People to Become Doctors?

Wednesday, April 29th, 2009

One of the things we’ve talked about a fair amount with GE and on the blog is our desire to see more people (especially kids) get interested in science and want to become scientists.

Well, it looks like we should also be thinking about how to get more kids to think about becoming doctors. This from Slate:

Obama-administration officials have reportedly become alarmed by doctor shortages, especially since millions of previously uninsured people would gain coverage—and therefore increase demand—if the president manages to pass national health care reform. To make up for the physician shortfall, which several studies suggest could reach 100,000 over the next 20 years, the Association of American Medical Colleges is recommending a 30 percent increase in med-school enrollment.

They then proceed to go through all the reasons why this is the case at the moment (more patients, doctors working fewer hours, etc.). I wonder if this isn’t another goal we can consider when we’re thinking about how to help communicate what GE is up to in the health world.

Update (4/29/09): J makes a good point in the comments: “Are you sure there’s really a shortage of students that want to become doctors? Looking at these numbers – looks like each school accepts far less than 10% of applicants. I realize that some are not qualified, some go to other schools, etc… but is it possible that there’s no need for encouragement? The demand is there – its just the supply that needs to be increased.” While this is true, I guess the flip side is that the schools need to keep their admissions low to keep the talent level high. Or maybe not, I’ve heard of colleges keeping admissions artificially low for rankings. Interesting.

Posted by Noah in The Internet
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Is there a Yelp for doctors/hospitals?

Thursday, April 2nd, 2009

YelpI know Yelp has doctor listings, but I wonder if there isn’t an opportunity to build one specifically around healthcare. Seems that more transparency would really help the system. One of the questions we got asked is if we knew what hospital was good for what and, as someone who has only been in the hospital twice (once for a fishhook in the ear and once for a broken wrist), I don’t.

Anyway, I’m sure there are sites out there that attempt this. Are any of them good? What are they? Could GE do something in this space?

Posted by Noah in Global Research Center
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